Reps. Pete Sessions (R-Texas) and Mike Fitzpatrick (R-Penn.) have sent out a letter to their GOP colleagues apologizing for the procedural snafu they created by skipping the official swearing-in in favor of a questionable fundraiser, and then casting some key votes anyways.

Pete Sessions has been in Congress for 14 years. Mike Fitzpatrick has been in and out of Congress for five years. Neither of these guys are newbies. They knew they had to be sworn in before voting but they didn’t think or they didn’t care when they voted anyway. They were drunk on arrogance.

This isn’t news but I’ve been complacent; got used to Nancy Pelosi’s presence; this hit me like a ton of bricks today: The Speaker of the House — John Boehner — is second in line to succeed the President should anything happen to him while he’s in office.

Greg Mitchell has been live blogging the release of the WikiLeaks cables for 41 days. (He’s either a hero or insane.) He just put up something interesting and ominous:

4:25 Not sure what to make of this but here goes: Birgitta Jonsdottir, a member of the Icelandic parliament (she represents citizens movements), tweeted one hour ago: “just got this: Twitter has received legal process requesting information regarding your Twitter account in (relation to wikileaks)” Then “usa government wants to know about all my tweets and more since november 1st 2009. do they realize i am a member of parliament in iceland?” Then: “i think i am being given a message, almost like someone breathing in a phone…”

I obviously don’t know what to make of this either other than it seems to tell us the U.S. government appears to think it has jurisdiction everywhere in the world.